Our protagonist is Peter Els, a 70-year- old composer, of some obscure renown among the cognoscenti. One day before the events of the novel’s present-day timeline unfold, he reads about the DIY biology movement – people tinkering with DNA in their garages – and orders the appropriate equipment himself from the internet
The Strangler Vine is set in India in 1837, when large areas of the country were ruled by the British East India Company.
Koch and Doyle were doggedly inquisitive men who discovered that neither germs nor crime are any match for science.
The Poisonwood Bible is a 1998 novel by Barbara Kingsolver, which tells the story of a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from the U.S. state of Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, close to the Kwilu River.
Percival Everett’s gleeful reboot of Mark Twain puts the enslaved Jim centre stage in a horrifying, painful and funny novel
An affectionate biography of the polymath includes details of never-produced gems such as Monty Python’s Third World War
